The Justgiving Blog

Thank you to all of you who have written to us, or posted comments on our blog, in response to our email on the removal of the pledging facility on Justgiving. We really appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback.

As I read your comments, I noticed some key misunderstandings about our service, which I wanted to dispel:

• Bar the removal of the “pay on completion” function on your fundraising pages, our service is unchanged. Justgiving continues to enable people to make a credit or debit card donation to your fundraising page. As Stef Hall commented, this is the preferred option for the vast majority of donors on Justgiving (90% of them to be precise) and tens of thousands of Justgiving pages already operate without the pledging option, and performing extremely well.
• Pledges that have already been made to your page will be processed as normal. There is absolutely nothing for your donors, or yourself, to do.

Thank you to those of you, like Ed Bird, for suggesting a pledging facility ‘lite’, which would enable potential donors to leave their email address on the page and receive an automatic reminder after the event.

Unfortunately, this model has been tested in the past, and proven to be largely unsuccessful: donors just do not respond to automatic emails, and charities lose out. What donors do appreciate is a personal message from you, so the best way to communicate with those donors who prefer to give after the event is to email them then.

I would like to assure you that we never make changes to our fundraising pages without careful consideration. It is important to remember that we are doing this to comply with the highest possible levels of online security, which will be expected of all online merchants by June 2007. We simply decided to remain ahead of the game. Increased security, along with real-time processing of donations, will result in more money being raised for charity.

Our product development team will review your comments and suggestions carefully over the next few days and weeks. Please continue to send us your feedback. Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Anne-Marie Huby
Managing Director
Justgiving

September will see a major upgrade of Justgiving’s donation processing system. One key consequence of this change is that we will no longer be able to support the processing of pledges – the ‘pay on completion’ option on your fundraising page.

Please take a moment to read our simple six-point explanation of how this came about, and what it means for your fundraising page.

1. How do pledges currently work?

When a donor chooses to pledge rather than donate right away, Justgiving captures their full card details and only debits the card after the event has been completed.  Up until that point, ‘pledgers’ can cancel or amend their gift at any time.

2. Why is Justgiving making this change?

In September, Justgiving will introduce a cutting-edge, real-time authorisation system that will deliver the latest security and fraud-prevention techniques to your donors.

Not only will this help further reassure your donors that online giving is highly secure, but it will also benefit charities by reducing the number of donation cancellations and charge-backs (where a donation is contested by the card owner and refunded via their credit card company).

Pledges need to be phased out because they will not be compatible with the enhanced security environment that we will deploy in September.

For instance, we will start asking donors to enter the 3-digit security code at the back of their cards. Because this code authenticates the donor as the rightful owner of the card, it cannot be stored in any circumstances by Justgiving.

Because pledges involve the storage of a donor’s card details until the transaction can be processed, we will no longer be able to support them under our new security rules in September.   

Though pledges are popular in a minority of cases, we believe that the benefits of enhanced security will vastly outweigh the loss of pledges.

3. What will happen to pledges already made?

Pledges that have already been made will continue to be processed in the ‘traditional’ way. There is absolutely nothing for your donors, or yourself, to do.

4. When will the pledging option be removed?

Donors will no longer be able to make a pledge through your page from Monday 21st August. 

5. Will I raise less because of this change?

Many Justgiving pages are already operating without the pledging option, and doing equally well in the long run.

6. What if my donors do not wish to donate right away?

To ensure you raise as much as you would without the pledging option, it is important to send out another round of emails to friends and family right after your event, to encourage those who have yet to donate. It is a good time to refresh your page with a new photo and a message, to show them you actually made it!

If you have sponsors who strongly do not wish to donate until after you have completed your fundraising event / activity, suggest a date (i.e. 1 day after you event) when they can return to your fundraising page and make a donation.

If you have any questions or suggestions about this change please do email us.

Every single fundraising page on Justgiving now has its very own RSS feed!

It’s something that a fair few of our users have been asking for, so we’ve gladly obliged.

To subcribe, all you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the fundraising page you want to monitor and then import the RSS data into your current reader.

Here’s a working example: my best friend Dave is currently cycling from John o’Groats to Land’s End (right now he’s getting very cold and wet in the highlands somewhere) and doing some fundraising for Rainer. Here is his page and here are the instructions for me to track his donations. Now I can keep updated on his fundraising without having to keep checking the page directly, since I use Google Sidebar as my RSS reader and any new donations will pop into my web clips section. Easy.

So if you’d like to track your own page more effectively, or the page of someone you know, then get subscribing to those feeds!

If RSS means absolutely nothing at all to you then check out the BBC’s explanation. They say it better than I can.